Friday Ramble - Journey

Journey comes from the Middle English journei, meaning day (or day's travel), through the Old French jornee and Vulgar Latin diurnta, then the Late Latin diurnum (meaning day), or perhaps the neuter form of the Latin diurnus, meaning daily or "of a day". The word claims kinship with journal, diurnal, and diary which comes to us from the Latin diārium meaning daily allowance or record. Somewhere in there too and predating 950 CE by a fair interval are the Middle English dæg; and the Germanic tag. At the beginning of it all is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *dhegh- "to burn".

The word harks back to the long ago time when we moved from place to place on our own two feet and measured our barefoot progress by the amount of daylight involved in doing so. There are some lovely synonyms for this week's word in our language: adventure, campaign, caravan, expedition, exploration, migration, odyssey, passage, peregrination, pilgrimage, quest, ramble, roaming, roving, safari, sally, seeking, sojourn, transmigration, vagabondage, voyage, wandering and wayfaring.

Journeying is not simply getting from one place to another place. When I say the word (and I am fond of it), I don't think of trips to school or marketplace, but of childhood rambles and a clear sense even then that life was an adventure unfolding - that something grand, magical and illuminating awaited behind the next tree or around a bend on the trail ahead. My younger self spent hours watching leaves float down rivers of windfall light, how light turned the whole world dazzling gold as the sun went down at the end of the day.  A mere sapling has no words for such things, but feelings of wonder and possibility tugged at my sensibilities,. "Ready or not, here I come, seeking something magical, mysterious and incandescent, I know not what."

From her early adventures, that odd little girl moved on into college, adulthood, work, marriage, parenting, all the inevitable bumps and potholes in the shambolic road of life. Oh, there were snippets of fey knowing here and there, but the midlife journey often seemed to be "arrow straight" and running toward a flat horizon, nary a tree, a hill, a cantrip or a mystery in sight.

I am older now, and I am (hopefully) a little wiser for all my meanderings. In these creaky, eldering days, I think about the wind blowing through the trees of my native place, of sunrises seen from the cliffs above Dalhousie Lake. I think of migrating geese and drifting fogs in early morning, the way clouds seen from heights often seem to form a sparkling road - one spiralling right out into the great beyond. There are glorious sunsets to be seen if one climbs a mountain at twilight, but they can be viewed from the shoreline too, often in the company of herons.

Here I am again, watching leaves float down the river in season, haunting shorelines with a camera and trying to capture that twilight moment when the world seems to be spun out of gold. The childhood sense of journeying and mystery that seemed to vanish during my frantic middling years has returned and so have my dreams. There are islands in the sky at sunrise, tall wooden ships bound for faraway places and unknown adventures in the offing, eldritch musics offered in the voices of the sirens.

Childhood rambles, my university years, and the straightforward thoroughfares of middle life are behind me, and these eldering days are about community, wildness, and grace unfolding. May there be joy and enchantment on your journey. May there be wonder and adventures in your life, and may there be light.